I just added 40+ HQ photos of Eva at Godiva’s Valentine’s Day Partnership With EJAF Announcement. Enjoy!

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Public Appearances > Events from 2010 > Godiva’s Valentine’s Day Partnership With EJAF Announcement

One perk of being married to an all-star basketball player? Free courtside seats. The downside? You might have to share him with a bunch of other guys on Valentine’s Day.

Just ask Eva Longoria Parker!

At yesterday’s Godiva Valentine’s Day Partnership with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Eva dished about the challenges of having her hubby Tony Parker play in the All-Star game on Feb. 14 and still make time for romance…

The Desperate Housewives star doesn’t need fancy chocolate, jewelry or flowers…She only has one requirement for the big day.

“As long as I’m with my husband!” she told E! News. “Which kinda sucks sometimes, ’cause Valentine’s Day always falls on All-Star weekend, and he’s always made the All-Stars. So I’m usually with a bunch of big sweaty guys trying to squeeze in a romantic dinner.”

Eva also reveals that not only is Tony competitive on the court, he’s also competitive in courting his lady.

“We both actually have competitions with who’s more romantic, but he’s beaten me a lot of times,” Eva said of her hubby. “He’s really romantic…I’m really lucky.”

If Eva ever wants a sympathetic ear about her hubby’s sporting schedule, she’s got another famous fashionista hitched to a star athlete that she can turn to—the actress first got involved with the Elton John AIDS Foundation through the Beckhams.

“When David and Victoria moved to L.A., Victoria and Eva became good friends. And she introduced us, and we got along like a house on fire,” Elton John’s partner, David Furnish, tells E! of how he originally began working with the Desperate Housewife.

Talk about an A-list entourage. We’re sure BFFs Eva and Posh will be at Elton’s annual A-list Oscar charity fete this year. And hopefully this year, Tony and David can make it too!

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Sometimes the most successful people hide in plain sight, not necessarily underestimated—they have serious achievements, after all—but definitely thought of as successful only in a certain way. That’s Eva Longoria Parker.

Most folks think of her as Gabrielle Solis on ABC’s Desperate Housewives, one of the funniest and sauciest characters in a show full of them. (A choice quote from Gaby: “It’s an elevator, silly. It has an emergency stop button. And I don’t.”) After that, what else? Yes, people might see her in celeb magazines with her husband, NBA star Tony Parker, or in her L’Oreal commercials.

That’s about, oh, half of her story.

Using Housewives as her foundation, Longoria Parker, 34, has leveraged her notoriety and growing wealth in areas well outside the acting realm, becoming a legitimate businesswoman and philanthropist and positioning herself to become the equivalent of the CEO of a multi-industry conglomerate. She’s started a production company, UnbeliEVAble Entertainment, to develop projects. She co-owns Beso, a 150-seat Hollywood restaurant that includes some of her own recipes on the menu (try the tortilla soup), and just opened a second lo-cation in Las Vegas along with a nightclub called Eve.

She is also part of The GreenVille Project, a real estate development initiative dedicated to building environ-mentally neutral retail spaces. She’s working on a fragrance. She’s a spokesperson for L’Oreal, Pepsi and Heineken Light. She has also founded Eva’s Heroes, a charity that provides an after-school program for children with developmental disabilities and support for their families. Longoria Parker is also national spokes-person for PADRES Contra El Cáncer, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of Latino children with can-cer.

Building upon Success
She sums all this up with one word: ambition. Longoria Parker decided a long time ago that any success she had in show business would simply be a foundation. “Building on success is a conscious approach,” she says.

“Whenever I do something, I want it to be a tent pole for many other businesses. My production company is all about writing, creating, developing film and TV projects. With the restaurants, I’ve always known it was going to be a franchise, with the tent pole based in Hollywood, but expanded into both big restaurants and smaller venues, and later with food items in stores, a cookbook and other things. And I want my perfume to be my tent pole for a clothing line, home line, bedding, shoes or accessories.”

“Ambition drives a lot more success than talent and intellect.”

This woman, clearly, is not your typical Hollywood star. One of her advantages is that acting wasn’t her primary dream—she grew up on a ranch outside Corpus Christi, Texas, and has a kinesiology degree from Texas A&M-Kingsville. “I was a total athlete,” she says. “I wanted to work at a college, be a fitness director or recreational director. After I got my bachelor’s, I was going to go for my master’s in sports medicine, and I wanted to do sports injuries.” She laughs. “I mean, I couldn’t be further from what I had intended to do.”

A talent contest led her to L.A., where the acting itch developed into a full-blown bug. She landed roles on some daytime dramas, including one on The Young and the Restless that netted her a 2002 ALMA Award (true to her ambition, she is now that award show’s executive producer). Then came Housewives, and the rest is history, or, at least it would be for most actresses. Not Longoria Parker.

Business First
See, here’s the thing: Initial success in (insert your personal dream here) sometimes ends up holding us back. We achieve something admirable and continue with that as long as we can because, hey, we’re livin’ the dream, right? Example: How many actresses in Hollywood would have been just fine getting a gig like Housewives and working on it until the show ran its course? Take some film roles during the summer when the show is on hiatus, and then work toward the next gig? For a lot of women, that success would be enough. But what if that left an awful lot of potential on the table?

That leads to Longoria Parker’s second advantage. Many aspiring actors work the famed “service industry” jobs while trying to establish themselves, creating an army of L.A. bartenders and waitstaff. Not Longoria Parker. When she landed in L.A., she went to a temp agency to find a job and they ended up hiring her.

“I was a headhunter for four years while I was auditioning,” she says. “It turned out that I was really good at it and it gave me a taste of corporate America. I loved it. I love the business side of my business, and I love anything that has a measurable success. In acting, there’s no rhyme or reason, no measurement that says, ‘OK, you succeeded.’ It’s luck and talent combined into one. Whereas I’ve always liked business, because if you have a clear, well-thought-out business plan and execute it, you know when you succeed.”

So while thousands of actors work tirelessly to escape their restaurant jobs to work on film sets, Longoria Parker’s pre-stardom background has her running restaurants from film sets.

Leveraging the Fame
Skeptics in the audience would say, “Oh, she’s just using her name to sell all these other things.” And after laughing at that for a second, Longoria Parker replies, “Leveraging the fame is the point. Everybody does that—it’s called a marketing plan. If you’re AT&T, you’re going to use AT&T’s name power in your marketing plan. Celebrities just happen to have a built-in marketing tool—themselves.”

That, however, leaves one very important factor exposed, and Longoria Parker knows it: “Celebrity names can only drive awareness,” she says. “It’s still always going to be about the product. That’s one thing I’m very proud of about Beso. I may have gotten the restaurant’s name out there, but the food keeps people coming back. You can be the celebrity owner of anything, a restaurant, a clothing line, a perfume, but that can only carry you so far. The product has to carry you the rest of the way.”

That’s why she’s so personally immersed in her businesses and charities, as opposed to just slapping her name on a label and heading back to the Housewives set. She is also savvy enough to know one of business’s more useful secrets: “an amazing team.” She has worked hard to make sure the people she partners with, and the managers she hires, give her what every CEO dreams of: “I’m involved in every aspect, but I don’t have to micromanage,” she says. “You stumble a lot trying to put the right team around you, but that’s one thing I’ve done really well. At Eva’s Heroes, my executive director is an amazing manager. The CEO at The GreenVille Project is probably the No. 1 contractor in green buildings of the moment.”

Ambition Is No. 1
So where does she find the time for all of this? Frankly, she doesn’t have to find time at all. “People have more time than they realize. There is so much wasted time in people’s lives. Just plan. And stick to the plan. My lifestyle requires a lot of planning—I wake up with 10,000 things to do. You just go over that hump and you get them done.”

If you need extra motivation, or an external force to help you prioritize, Longoria Parker suggests you volunteer for a charity that helps disadvantaged people. “When you visit with them and see a cause that’s greater than you, it pushes you. When I get out of bed in the morning, my motivation is never ‘not there.’?”

It’s funny, in a way, but Longoria Parker and her husband are really just like any other driven, dual-income couple in America. They just work on bigger stages with bigger numbers thrown around. Everything else is the same—especially that question about ambition. Achieve a dream and roll with it? Or achieve a dream and use it to launch a half-dozen others? “Ambition drives a lot more success than talent and intellect,” she says. “You have to have a little bit of those things as well, but ambition drives the hard work, your need to get educated, and your need to learn more about your business plan and your market. Ambition’s No. 1.”

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Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria is no stranger to Ecorazzi. We’ve profiled her eco-friendly ways many times — but in an interview with Jennifer Schwab, Director of Sustainability for Sierra Club Green Home, she opens up on how she became an environmentalist, thanks in large part to her father.

“Growing up on a ranch with lots of land and animals, I came to appreciate the beauty of nature and the simplicity of life,” she said. “It is because of this that I have an intense love for the earth and mother nature. My father instilled in me the idea of conservation at an early age and it has stuck with me since. He would take us camping for days at a time and teach us how to eat and survive off the land. He taught us how to find water, what berries to eat off trees, how to plant our own vegetables.”

Longoria adds that with such a background, she now leads by example in her own home. “To this day, I cannot be in a house where there are lights on in a room that is not being used. And I often yell at Tony for leaving the water on while brushing his teeth. I have managed to carry my conservation ideas into my own life. I don’t use bottled water in the house, we recycle, and use reusable bags at grocery stores.”

The 34-year-old actress also recently celebrated the launch of her new eco-friendly restaurant and nightclub in Vegas. From the article,

The City Center edition was created as a green version to meet LEED certification, with upgrades such as: a special $350,000 stove hood and scrubber to filter volatile organic kitchen compounds; Swarovski crystals which were reclaimed from the Oscars broadcast for use as chandeliers; reclaimed woods throughout; recycled wallpapers; recycled and compostable to-go boxes; recycled paper menus; a green cleaning crew; lots of natural light to save power during the day; locally sourced building materials to save on shipping and reduce the transportation carbon footprint.

Read the rest of the article here

I just added 200+ captures of Eva from last night’s episode of Desperate Housewives. Enjoy!

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Desperate Housewives > Season 6 > Screen Captures > 6×14 – The Glamorous Life